Category: SEO

If you’re looking to improve your content marketing and see real ROI, you have to use practices that will really benefit them.

Content that’s highly ranked, that drives traffic and leads is always user-focused, first and foremost.

That’s why today’s tips for SEO content in 2019 all point back to your reader, A.K.A. the V.I.P. and M.V.P. you need to know and understand to get it right.

Because, when you write to the right people in the right way, your writing and content will climb higher.

9 Keys for Creating Your Best SEO Content in 2019

Ready?

Here are my nine top tips for helping you create your best (most-read, most-shared, and most valuable) content this year and beyond.

1. Write to the Right People with Targeted Keywords

Your SEO content won’t reach the right people if you fail to optimize it with targeted keywords.

What do I mean by “targeted keywords”?

These are key terms and phrases for which your audience niche is actively searching.

To find these terms, you must first understand:

Who your audience segments are.

What kind of information they need.

Why they need that information.

Which keywords they’re using to find it.

This may seem like a lot, but it really isn’t if you break it down into a few activities:

Audience research: Identify the type of audience you think wants/needs what you offer. Then, go find where they congregate online. Talk to them. Survey them. Figure out their personal habits, preferences, demographics, and stats. (Marketing Land has a good guide on this process.)

We as a company spend a lot of time thinking about search engine optimization, or SEO. No small wonder, given that search is at the core of our business.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to drive traffic to your website. Paid media, social posts, and display advertising are just a few. But, when done well, SEO can provide an important — and cost-effective — strategy for organic growth. In fact, the latest research from web analytics company Parse.ly shows Google Search accounted for around half of external referrals to the publishers in its network this past year.

To really get the most out of SEO, though, it’s important to stay on top of the latest Google Search updates. That’s no different for us internally. We at Google own 7,000 websites that are managed by hundreds of product and marketing teams all over the world. Over 200 changes are made to these websites every single day, all of which could potentially affect a site’s SEO. When it comes to how Google sites appear in Search, they receive the same treatment as any other site on the web, and our teams follow the same external guidelines provided to webmasters. – Read more

SEO is a complex matter and one that web designers and developers might feel is best left to copywriters and search professionals to handle.

That makes sense since many common SEO hacks revolve around the manipulation of content and the tagging of it for search.

Here’s the thing though: there are certain choices you make as a web designer that ultimately affect the search-friendliness of your website. Which means you should be involved in the diagnosis and repair of a website’s SEO mistakes. – Read more

It’s time to take our annual look at what’s ahead for SEO professionals in 2019.

What SEO strategies and tactics will work and help you dominate in the SERPs and earn more revenue in 2019?

Here are 10 important trends you need to know in 2019, according to 47 of today’s top SEO professionals.

1. Understand Your Audience & User Intent

Does your audience prefer text? Images? Video? Audio.

Knowing this will all be more important than ever in 2019, according to our experts.

“You need to understand what someone is expecting to find when they query a word or phrase and you need to give them the answer in the simplest way possible,” said Mindy Weinstein CEO of Market Mindshift.

Motoko Hunt, president of AJPR, agreed, adding that the interests, tastes, and preferences of your audience can change more quickly than you think. – Read more

An effective digital marketing campaign results in the leads your business needs to grow. And one of the best ways to do that is with a top-notch SEO strategy. Of course, Google changes its search algorithms hundreds of times a year. This year, Google is prioritizing mobile-friendly websites with lightning fast loading speeds.

To ensure that your small business remains at the top of local search results in the new year, you need to follow these major SEO trends.

High quality content

Outfitting a website with relevant content has long been a strategy of digital marketers. But with each passing year, Google has gotten better at separating high-quality, thought-provoking content from low-grade spam. The better your website content, the more likely you are to appear at the top of important search engine results pages. Consumers are also more likely to trust your business when you have well-written website content boosting your brand image.

Through internal linking, great content can also be an important part of your sales funnel. Savvy SEO experts can channel visitors to key pages of your website, which will result in more conversions and an increase in “pages viewed per session” in Google Analytics. – Read More

As we near the end of the year, it’s time to review broken links, plugins, functionality and page speed before there is a crisis.

No matter how perfectly you’ve optimized a website, it will always require constant maintenance. This is because figuratively speaking, much like a vehicle, there are a lot of moving parts and many of those parts have an impact on others.

In other words — SEO will never be done. It’s a constantly moving target.

There are some tasks, like migrating from HTTP to HTTPS, that are done once. Other tasks are performed on a weekly or monthly like content development, and others that might be conducted on a quarterly or yearly basis.

As we near the end of the year, many marketers will begin planning for next year. It’s equally important to review what we’ve done throughout the year to make sure that our work didn’t inadvertently cause issues in other areas. This helps us to get the most from our efforts as well as to begin next year with a head start. – Read more

There’s not a rule per se as to how much content needs to be updated, but you can use your common sense.

If all you change is a few words or a date, or just add a picture for example, you aren’t really changing the content.

People like to try to game this system by moving paragraphs around but not really changing the point of an article, for example. Google is wise to this and will not reward you for it.

However, if you have an article like “5 Predictions for SEO in 2018” and you update it to be “5 Predictions for SEO in 2019” and actually change most of the content, there are ways to help Google find out about it more quickly.

But before I share that, I want to be clear: the content needs to be different.

You can’t just post the same five predictions you made in 2018 and put them in a different order.

You can’t use four of the same five and just change one.

That’s not going to fly.

I use a real-world test. If I sent this article via email to my loyal followers, would they find value in it, or would I be irritating them by sending the same thing I previously sent?

Back in October, we were the first to claim that 2019 will be the year of page speed. We’ve got our eyes on the market and lemme tell you: Google is sending serious signals that it’s crunch time to deal with your slow pages.

Faster pages are a strategic marketing priority.

And sure enough, Google has made yet another change to uphold that prediction. In early November, they quietly rolled out the most significant update to a core performance tool we’ve seen to date, announcing the latest version of PageSpeed Insights.

So what does this update mean for marketers and their bottom line?

If you’ve used PageSpeed Insights to test page performance, it’s time to retest! Because your old speed scores don’t matter anymore. The good news is that you’ll have new data at your fingertips to help you speed up in ways that actually matter to your prospects and potential conversions. – Read more